BERTHOLD Goldschmidt is dead. I don't know whether to mourn, or to blow up the BBC.

For 61 years Goldschmidt enjoyed the benefits of British asylum - which is to say he was permitted to survive as long as he did not make much noise. The custodians of cultural mediocrity - the BBC, the opera houses, the music establishment - treated this accomplished composer with disdain. When his operas were acclaimed in Berlin in the presence of the German president, no British official bothered to attend. Pencilled in for an overdue honour in the last Birthday List, he was denied by Whitehall delaying tactics.

The day he died, last Thursday, France Musique and Spanish radio cleared their schedules to pay evening-long tributes to this "British composer of German extraction". Radio 3? A drive-time presenter murmured regrets and played the Comedy of Errors overture lasting all of five minutes.

In six decades Goldschmidt had 19 minutes of music played at the Proms - none of it by a BBC orchestra. When the Philharmonia tried to organise a Goldschmidt weekend at the South Bank, the plan fell through because of BBC indifference. Must I go on, or will you take my word for it that no composer of merit has been more cruelly treated by the music controllers of any supposedly open and democratic society?

Goldschmidt had been a young lion of the Weimar Republic, where the leading conductors Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer vied for his scores and critics hailed him as "the white hope of German music". Unlike many exiles, he never looked back. The string quartet and ballets he wrote in the late Thirties are propulsive, personal and transcendent of time and place - too cosmopolitan by half for British tastes.

Related Articles

As if to assert his Englishness, Goldschmidt won a national competition for a Festival of Britain opera with a setting of Shelley's The Cenci - only for Covent Garden to refuse a production when it learned that three of the four winners were "foreigners".

Any two-eared administrator who bothered to look at Goldschmidt's score, or listen to radio extracts in 1953 would have had to recognise two bare truths: Beatrice Cenci is one of the most fluid settings of an English text since Handel's Messiah; and its rage of sexual jealousy (a favourite Goldschmidt theme) renders almost every English opera of its era insipid by comparison.

Beside it, Britten's Rape of Lucretia seems as gawky as a gob-stoppered school-boy. Yet while The Rape is revived in all its shortcomings every couple of years, Cenci has yet to be seen on a British stage.

When xenophobia was reinforced by William Glock's atonal hegemony at the BBC, Goldschmidt gave up composing altogether. For 25 years he taught and conducted, helping Deryck Cooke create the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony and advising young Simon Rattle.

IT took a string of small miracles to spark his revival. In 1983, after another BBC rejection, his opera The Magnificent Cuckold was picked up by one of his students, Bernard Keeffe, and given a run-through at Trinity College of Music. It was heard by David Drew, who undertook to publish Goldschmidt at Boosey & Hawkes. Rattle then brought the roof down in Berlin with Ciaconna Sinfonica. A Decca producer, Michael Haas, decided to record Cuckold - against strenuous objections from friends in the BBC.

Goldschmidt responded with a late bouquet of works - two string quartets, a song-cycle and an elegiac Rondeau for violin and orchestra. I recall him, at 87, clasping in wonderment the very first recording of his music. Every so often afterwards, he would say to me, "I must stay alive until . . ." until Cuckold is recorded; and released; and staged by Harry Kupfer; and revived in Switzerland. He longed for a British production of one of his operas; when that goal proved elusive, he gave up and died.

And is that it? The hell it is. Goldschmidt's music is selling on every high street and being performed the world over. It will certainly outlast the worthless satraps who worked so hard and so long to pretend he did not exist.